Advances in telephony equipment have led to a significant increase in the options and features available to users. It is common for telephone devices to include advanced or special features such as conference, call transfer, call trade, etc. that can be accessed and invoked by pressing soft and/or hard keys on the telephone devices. Many of these telephone devices have layered soft key menus requiring users to navigate through one or more screens before being presented with the menu containing the soft key associated with the advanced or special feature of interest. Although sighted users find these telephone devices easy to use, this is not the case for visually impaired users. For a visually impaired user, locating advanced or special feature keys and navigating through the layered soft key menus requires extensive training. As will be appreciated, telephony equipment and telecommunications systems that are easily used by visually impaired users are desired.
It is therefore an object of the present invention to provide a novel a telephone device that is responsive to output generated by an auxiliary input device to enable a user to invoke advanced or special features of the telephone device without requiring use of the telephone device keys.